A Manifold Voice [antikvár]

Preface IN this book I start from an assumption of the intimacy of language and literature, an intimacy so close and active that I see language as the co-partner with the author in producing a given work. The existence of a work of literature depends not on the writer alone but also on the degree of maturity the language it is written in has attained to, just as its complexity and fineness depend on the range of resources within that language. The practice of criticism, consequently, is not limited to the immediate analysis of the work in question but it also involves a telling-over of the powers latent in the language. A belief of this kind is the ground of the double intention in A Manifold Voice. First, I seek to explore some of the less familiar resources—less familiar to the British reader, that is—existing in the English language by pointing, as precisely and concretely as I can, at a number of writers who have worked in traditions outside those of Britain and the United States. The amazing capacity of English to express such a span of sensibility, whether "West Indian, Canadian, Australian, African, New Zealand, Indian, testifies not only to the gifts of individual authors but to the genius of the language. Secondly, my intention is to offer an answer to a question implicit in this undertaking: which of the authors writing in English outside Britain and the United States of America have made a significant use of the resources of the language? Which of them are of more than simply local importance? My answer is my choice. These are the writers who, judged by appropriate standards, have added to the canon of literature in English: who have realised, that is, in a creative way capacities implicit in the language. I do not claim for all these writers an equal significance. Some are without doubt more important than others. All are serious writers, all are genuinely representative; but there are some who are more important representatively than intrinsically. In fact, in one or two—as, I hope, my treatment shows—the representative quality, the capacity to embody a national identity and sensibility, shades and limits the pure literary worth. Nor can one overlook the great differences in context in which these writers operate. Patrick White, for example,